This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Matt Lowrie, 55, who lives in Colorado and used to work at Google. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I joined Google as a test engineer in 2006. It was a very exciting time. The company gave us the freedom to try things, and it felt like anything was possible in engineering.
I spent nearly 19 years there, but I quit after saving enough to retire early and because I felt the company was pressuring me to adopt AI too quickly. Since then, I’ve started to appreciate how AI can be a helpful productivity tool in my daily life.
I felt like I had aged out of Google
My initial focus at Google was on 3D software, but I moved to other parts of the company, including online web applications, Google Now, and cloud software.
By 2024, I felt the focus at Google shifting increasingly toward incorporating AI capabilities into its products, and they were encouraging us to use AI to help with coding. Although I was interested in machine learning, I was skeptical about adopting AI in this way at the time.
I wondered if it would eliminate our jobs entirely, and more than that, I struggled to trust the technology for the work I was responsible for.
Having coded for so long, using AI for it felt less interesting to me, like I was asking someone else to write code then fixing what didn’t work. I felt I could no longer write something from scratch and come up with my own interesting solutions.
I’d built up a process for getting things done over many years, and I found it hard to adapt to this new way of doing things so quickly, while younger colleagues seemed to pick up AI coding more easily.
I felt that if this was the direction Google was going in, then maybe I’d aged out of it.
In November 2025, I handed in my resignation and retired early at 55. I was relieved and excited to start a new chapter, especially as I’d done a lot of planning to make retiring early feasible.
I learned AI could make me more productive
It was only after I quit and I had more time to experiment with personal projects that I started to understand how I could incorporate AI into my daily life.
I used Gemini to help me decide which World Cup games to go to by creating a tool for searching matches by team and city.
I prompted it to make the app’s UI look like an illustration that I’d drawn on a piece of paper, and it managed to figure out exactly what I needed. That would’ve taken me hours if I’d done it manually, which showed me that AI can be a good productivity tool.
I needed to brush up on skills I hadn’t used in years
One tip I have for those getting to grips with AI is to brush up on your written language skills. You often have to prompt LLMs with a whole paragraph of context, but I never really did well in English or humanities, so I had to redevelop these skills, even for silly things.
On my brother’s birthday, I wanted to send him a funny AI-generated image of Steph Curry holding a cake. I started out by saying, “Create an image of Steph Curry with a birthday cake,” which came out with something terrible. I had to refine my prompt to explain that I wanted Curry to be holding the cake in his hands and presenting it like a chef. I learned I had to be descriptive to get the image I wanted.
I don’t regret leaving Google
I’m happy about the timing of my decision to leave Google.
The AI race means companies are putting out powerful tools all the time, and they’re available to everyone. For now, I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything that I would’ve had as a Google engineer. Plus, I don’t have the added stress of trying to figure out how to use LLMs while meeting deadlines at work.
I have no regrets.
Google declined to respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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